Psychoanalytic Materialism

Psychoanalytic Materialism is a critical-theoretical position articulated against the backdrop of contemporary "new materialisms" (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and related currents). Its theoretical move is to claim that psychoanalysis can engage the challenge of post-Kantian correlationism—the charge that thought has been trapped inside the subject-world correlation and cannot access the in-itself—without simply abandoning the ontological specificity of the human subject. The key lever is the concept of the Real understood not as a brute, pre-discursive thing-in-itself (as certain new materialists tend to construe their equivalent of the real), but as the consequence of castration: the Real is the remainder or lapse produced when the speaking being enters the symbolic order and forfeits an impossible completeness it never had. Sexuality is thus an "ontological lapse"—a structural gap internal to human being—rather than a merely biological or anthropocentric datum, and it is this lapse that marks the human without grounding any hierarchy over nonhuman others.

The ethical stakes are equally central. New materialism's "democracy of objects" (the leveling of all entities into a flat ontology) forecloses rather than enables an ethics of the nonhuman other, because it dissolves the very notion of lack, castration, and negativity that would make such an ethics possible. Psychoanalytic Materialism insists that only by retaining the Lacanian categories of the Real-as-lapse, of castration, and of the subject's constitutive lack can one think an ethical relation to what is radically other—human or nonhuman—without either reabsorbing it into a humanist hierarchy or dissolving it into a flat continuum of equivalent objects.

The concept appears on p. 181 of subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, at what the source signals as a culminating moment—"the horizon of this antagonism"—in a sustained argument about what psychoanalysis can contribute to contemporary materialist philosophy. It directly cross-references several canonical Lacanian concepts that it mobilizes as its theoretical resources. Castration supplies the ontological claim: the Real is not a pre-symbolic plenitude but the structural consequence of the signifier's impact on jouissance, which means psychoanalysis can speak to the in-itself without naïvely positing a thing-beyond-thought. Lack and the Ontological Lapse (sexuality as a gap internal to human being) serve as the ontological non-foundation on which Psychoanalytic Materialism builds its account of human specificity without hierarchy. Fantasy, Fetishistic Disavowal, and Negation are implicitly in play as the apparatus through which subjects—and philosophies—manage or refuse the encounter with this constitutive void. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis provides the normative horizon: if castration and lack are retained, an ethics of the Other (including the nonhuman other) becomes possible; if they are dissolved into a flat ontology, ethics collapses.

Relative to these canonicals, Psychoanalytic Materialism functions as an extension and re-application: it takes concepts developed in Lacan's clinical and structural-logical registers (castration, lack, Real, fantasy) and deploys them as interventions in a contemporary philosophical debate about ontology, correlationism, and posthumanism. It is not a critique of those canonical concepts but rather a claim about their untapped philosophical reach—an argument that the Lacanian framework is already a materialism, one more rigorous than its rivals precisely because it refuses both idealist correlationism and the naïve realism of a "democracy of objects."

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.181)

The horizon of this antagonism, finally, is a properly psychoanalytic materialism that can address the trouble with correlationism without, however, abnegating the ontological peculiarity of the human.

The phrase "properly psychoanalytic materialism" is theoretically loaded because "properly" signals that existing materialisms are improper—either caught in correlationism or dissolving into flat ontology—while "psychoanalytic" names castration, lack, and the Real-as-lapse as the corrective. "Without abnegating the ontological peculiarity of the human" then performs the double refusal at the concept's core: rejecting anthropocentric hierarchy and rejecting the posthumanist erasure of that peculiarity simultaneously.